Midwinter Trees
by yellowcottondresses
Summary: She isn't in love with him, he isn't in love with her; they don't need to be in love for this to work. It's probably more important that they don't love each other, anyway. ONESHOT.


**Author's Note: Somebody help me, I don't know how I ended up writing this, and now here it is. This is not a drill. **

**Takes place between 3x13, "Somebody Pick Up My Pieces" and 3x15, "That's The Way Love Goes".**

**I don't own Nashville.**

**I.**

This is not a love story.

**II.**

There's a magnolia tree in her yard.

Right now you can't tell what it is because it looks dead. It's the middle of winter and nothing is left except long black branches, withered and shrunken like talons, or claws on the fairy tale witch – apple for you, my pretty? They scrabble and scratch and scrape at the slate grey sky but can't reach it, can't make the sun come out again so they can drink in the light and bring the flowers back to bloom.

**III.**

All she wants is a shower, but Will won't leave. Every time she tries to give him the hint, he finds more and more reasons to stay – does she need to heat turned up? Does she need anything from the grocery store? Does she need another blanket, a cup of coffee, anything?

She needs a shower. She can smell herself. _Please leave me alone._

The hospital shrink already asked her everything Will is trying to say but won't:

_Do you have any thoughts of hurting yourself?_

_Do you have access to lethal means?_

_Do you think that if you are released you will harm yourself?_

_Are you distressed that your attempt to end your life failed?_

Distressed.

Of course she's distressed. She wanted to die and she failed. She's the twenty-year-old, washed-up, spurned divorcee reality star joke, about to be dropped from her record label. She's a human punchline. She has nobody, nothing. Of course she's distressed.

Now she just wants him to leave so she can be distressed privately. With a hot shower. And clothes that don't smell like sweat and disinfectant and crinkling backless gowns and psychiatric ward.

He sees her struggling with the bracelet, and cuts it off with the tenderness of snipping it from a newborn. She glances at the knife he takes out of his pocket and thinks, absently, that she was married to him for almost a year and never knew he carried a Swiss Army knife in his pocket, although it makes some twisted kind of sense that he'd feel the need to have a weapon on him at all times. They're not married anymore and she's still both surprised and not surprised by her ex-husband.

He doesn't even touch her wrist when he snips it off. Just brings the down to slice cleanly through the plastic, the metal never grazing her skin. Like if he touches her at all, she'll break in half.

**IV.**

He has to be dropping her from the label.

That's the only reason he'd be at her house.

**V.**

She wakes up in the middle of the night and he's not there and her back is gouged with long scratches and her lips are swollen, her mouth dry, and she's not sure why she let him in her door.

They're just friction, she tells herself. And whatever happened at Winterville Nashfest.

(And that night in the hospital she woke up and found him sleeping in the chair next to her bed and she was so surprised to see him there she just stared, and when he didn't wake up she laid back down and stared at the wall and convinced herself it was some kind of weird dream, and when she woke up again he was gone so it was easy to believe that it wasn't real, because he never spoke about it, and she didn't see him again until he showed up at her door the day before Edgehill went up in smoke, along with anything that made sense about them.)

When she wakes up again, it's to Will's voice on the radio, dragging her back to consciousness after a dream of the night of the party. The tree line surrounding Jeff's house, black and winter-withered. The cold corpse claws of the branches reaching for her in the freezing, starless night. The gemstone-colored water of the pool, lapping at her feet as she stepped closer and closer.

And once again, her husband – ex-husband – pulls her out of the darkness.

She's trying to decide if she still resents him for that or not when she sees Jeff on the couch, and it surprises her so much it makes her forget about the dream, the question she was asking herself, the questions the hospital shrink was asking her, the questions Will couldn't ask her, the questions nobody who watched the reality show was asking her.

The only thing on her mind was the question of what they are, exactly. Or if it matters.

**VI.**

He's still here.

There's still not an answer.

**VII.**

Winter backhands them hard like a snide remark right after Valentine's Day, and it's so appropriate that it would make Layla laugh.

If it weren't so fucking cold.

The ice is relentless and the days are colorless, and her feet are always frozen. It takes her almost forty-five minutes to de-ice her car one morning and she decides it's not that important that she go to the grocery store, even though there's nothing in the house except packaged oatmeal and hummus and almond milk, and coffee, and beer.

She was supposed to spend the morning in meetings with Bucky and Rayna, but the city is shut down. He's iced in with her because his Mercedes doesn't have four-wheel drive and he can't make it down her frozen-over street. He doesn't look concerned; he's already ordering Pad Thai for them by the time she gets off the phone with Bucky. They tip the delivery guy $50 for making it in the cold and eat in bed and it makes her feel so grown up, even after being married and divorced and being on two different reality shows and two different record labels, this is what makes her feel like an adult, even when she spells out words with her noodles and Jeff flicks one into her face and then laughs when it gets stuck in her hair.

**VIII.**

There isn't a plan, things just kept happening, and maybe she's the equivalent of a shiny red sports car or hair implants but the more it keeps happening, the more things feel…upright.

He isn't her boyfriend. She isn't his anything.

She doesn't trust him, but she believes him when he says she can come back from this.

She doesn't think he trusts anyone. Not her. But he believes she can sing.

It's waiting for the other foot to drop, and everything to fall apart again.

Neither of them believe in love. He told her that once, when he was still making her record love songs, right after he got done telling her that she had no feelings.

Neither one of them believes in anything, really, and she maybe that's why it works before she tells herself to stop overthinking it.

**IX.**

The ice under the snow is the real killer, and the institutional-grey sky. She looks out her window and it reminds her of staring at the hospital ceiling when she first woke up, tubes in her nose and needles in her arm and the soul-crushing revelation that no matter how hard she'd tried, she'd failed again.

**X.**

She feels most alive when they're insulting each other.

It's a balance that works more than she and her husband ever did. And not just because Jeff actually wants to touch her. It works because they both need something to push against.

They don't just shut up and sing, like Will does. They need something to fight. It's animal and urge and going to land them both in trouble, but it makes her feel like she's a person again, not an actress in her own life.

So it goes: they fight, they fuck, they're over it.

She isn't in love with him, he isn't in love with her; they don't need to be in love for this to work. It's probably more important that they don't love each other, anyway.

She doesn't need to be in love. She's angry enough as it is.

When she was in love with Will, she believed that if she knew everything about him, if he would talk to her, if he would just _tell _her what was going on inside his head, then everything would come together. She used to believe it was all about being as open as possible, complete honesty, knowing everything about each other. She used to think love made you transparent, made your skin thinner than paper; blank like canvas, clear as water.

This is nothing like that, so it's a good thing it's not love.

**XI.**

The only thing she can do when she's iced in like this is write. Either that or scrub the place top to bottom with Mr. Clean Scrubbing Bubbles and a serious case of cabin fever, but that leads nowhere, and going around in circles only makes her more wired.

So she writes.

She writes the crumbling of her bones when she opened the door and saw Will with that woman, the sparkling lights in the naked treetops surrounding the mansion, the hellish green glow of the water and the slick oily black of the sky above and beneath her tilting tipping spinning. She writes Will taking her to the car when he picked her up from the hospital, the ink not yet dry on their divorce papers, almost but not quite touching the small of her back, his arms awkwardly posed around her like he was waiting for her to fall and shatter –

(like he could actually catch her)

– and how he drove under the speed limit on the way back to the house, and it was the last time she'd ever be in his truck.

She writes sitting all day in that lobby for Rayna, knowing this was her last chance.

She writes the tasteless pudding that was fed to her in the psyche ward, the kind that gummed in her throat like plaster. How there was nothing to do for those long, blank days but sleep and sleep and sleep behind doors locked with jangling keys, and when she closed her eyes she dreamed of the trees lining the way to Jeff's house and how they led to the water and she could drift there forever and how closing her eyes and letting the chlorine take her breath away was the easiest choice she'd ever made, easier than swallowing the entire bottle of pills or falling into bed with Jeff that first night. How choosing to die was so much easier than hating her husband ever was, because she'd always loved him, even if she'd never hate anyone more.

She writes until the sky stops reminding her of the view from her hospital bed and starts looking like the darkness that was the last thing she saw before she slipped under the water, how she felt like she was falling into it, and it was okay to let go because she'd never hit the bottom, just keep falling, and after a while, it would feel like floating, like flying.

**XII.**

Her heels are too high to be taken seriously and she doesn't care and he can't just stand there and tell her she looks like a twenty-dollar hooker. They never make it out the door, barely to the couch.

Her dress comes off and her underwear slides down and her legs are pushed aside and there are lips and a mouth and a tongue warm and insistent, so she lies back and there's pulsing pressing pushing licks, and she keeps her eyes closed and head tilted back, whimpering to the ceiling. The more she twists and bucks and groans the more he holds her down, mouth against her, more pressure, his hand on her hip to lock her in place while he sucks and licks and sweeps his tongue downward, not being gentle, he's been a lot of things to her but gentle was never one of them and still isn't, he's greedy and wants her to get off and she's greedy and wants to get off and she does, shouting, and he looks so self-satisfied that he made her squirm and shout and come, and she wants to wipe the smirk off his face but she's still shaky and he's such an ass, too pleased with himself, and she giggles because his mouth made funny sounds when he licked her, and he pulls his own pants off and his face is so smug but she won't admit, she lost this one.

**XIII.**

The days are so grey and bleak that sleep is the only relief, except every night she dreams of the pool. Stepping into the water and staring at the neon bottom and looking straight above her and all she sees is black, spinning, people's pretty faces like masks snarling laughing yelling, their pretty dresses glittering savagely like hard diamonds and teeth, and it all spins like a demented merry-go-round to hell so she closes her eyes and puts her face in the cold water, she's so cold anyway so it feels like being able to breathe, even when she opens her mouth and water rushes in and she lets herself just stare at the bottom, which doesn't look solid, just a soft light that pulses like it might be someplace warm.

At one point she looks out the window and it's completely blank outside, the snow coming down so hard she can't even see across the street, and she's locked in the middle of the grey. The magnolia tree in her yard is frozen and withered and it hovers, like something waiting. It doesn't look like the trees from Jeff's yard the night of the party. It's just a single dead thing standing there in the cold, like it belongs there where nothing grows.

**XIV.**

She still wonders why she let him in her door that day. Or got in that cab the night she went home with him, and he tugged at the end of her braid, smirking as he said, "nice pigtails", and they had sex twice on top of the covers.

It was easier when he thought she was useless pop fluff, riding Will's coattails to fame.

He has a key now.

**XV.**

She's used to feeling like everyone expects her to scrunch into spaces, because Will took up so much. Space. Energy. Air. Volume. Everything about him felt like more, and she was forced into less by default.

Now she can fight back. She can demand space. Even when he won't budge, he's daring her to quit asking, and just take it.

So she does.

There's fire and it's spreading and it's kisses that are hot and wet and wanting and she's the only person who can give it, they could strip off every bit of skin like it's just flimsy clothes and tear each other down to the bone and scrape all the flesh away with their teeth their nails their tongues mouths fingertips scraping it clean, making bloody messes of each other and still keep going, gnawing for the last bit of marrow until it's all devoured, this mess of appetite and viscera and propulsion and crippling need to be made of that white-hot lightning that makes you want to rip out your electric bones and hurl them aside and be nothing but atmosphere, hot and glorious and pulsing and dynamic and alive.

But the kitchen counter will have to do, so it's what they slam against, the cabinets holding her coffee cups digging into the back of her head and pushing her knees apart and hands everywhere, they push themselves together, breathing into each other's necks, he's rough and she wants him to be.

She's not breakable.

She feels like an animal. They both grown and bite and scratch and groan like them, so maybe they need to tear their skinbags away and let what's wailing underneath turn them inside out and fling them headfirst into the aching space between them, what little there is.

She's not breakable.

She can't break.

She's energy she's dissolved she's rocketing lightning like she's just swallowed a thunderstorm a colony of bees a live tornado and now she's spitting it back out.

**XVI.**

She bolts up in bed and Jeff mumbles in his sleep before turning back over. She doesn't want to crawl next to him like she's terrified of the dark but the room is black and her windows are so iced over that she can't see outside, and her head hurts so much the room spins, and it's like she's at the party again and she's spiraling so fast it forces every breath inside her out and crushes her body to sand and she can't grab onto anything, she can't get a grip and she hates that she has to lie down next to him because he's the only thing she can see in the dark, a shadow that looms like a bad dream, and she still can't breathe.

"Layla. What?"

She grips her arms, holding herself together.

"I'm freezing." It comes out as a whisper-whimper. Her teeth are chattering. She can't stop them.

Jeff switches on the light next to the bed, looks over at her.

"Well, you're kind of really warm right now," he says.

One hand comes up, grazing her cheek, and it's the softest he's ever been with her and it should feel weird but his hands feel like ice and she ducks away from him.

"I'm so cold," she says, through her clacking teeth.

Jeff withdraws his hand almost as quickly she pulled away from it.

"You've established that," he says, and gets out of bed.

"Where are you going?" Her voice is edging hysterical, but she feels panicked, for some reason. Panicked, and freezing, and the world won't stop spinning and she's so, so cold. She has to shake to feel less cold. She can't stop shaking.

He looks at her like she might be going insane.

"The bathroom," he says.

The door swings shut behind her, so final it brings tears to her eyes for some reason, and she's still so cold, her whole body is simmering radiating about to fly apart underneath her skin. She feels like she could get up and run a marathon right now, like she just drank more coffee than anyone should ever put in their bodies, and she didn't realize it was possible for anyone's heart to beat this hard. Is she having a heart attack?

Jeff comes back and it's like she forgot he was even here for a moment, because she stares at him wondering what he's doing here and he gives her something, a small pill and a glass of water.

She stares at the pill.

"It's not –" he says hurriedly, then shakes his head. "It's Advil. You've got a high fever."

"Okay," she says. She takes it, and then stares at it. "Okay," she says again. Then she keeps staring at it, muttering "okay" soundlessly under her breath, rocking back and forth, shivering all over.

Jeff rolls his eyes.

"Layla. Take it."

She opens, swallows obediently.

He grabs a pillow. "I'm going to sleep on the couch. You stay here. Close your eyes. Sleep it off."

She lies back down, like he says, but can't hold still.

"Drink some water," he says. He shuts the door to the bedroom without a sound and she huddles under the covers. Her skin feels too raw and bruised, and the blankets feel like wearing sandpaper. The spot where he used to be is warmer so she rolls into it. Curled like a comma in the dark, a pause, and she's not sure what she's waiting for.

**XVII.**

She feels like she might be dying, again. Her head pounds and she can't look at the light next to her bed, and her throat is so dry that she can barely sip the stale water in the cup next to her bed. Jeff comes in at some point and pours her a new cup of water with ice, but reaching out to touch it makes her wither under the covers again, vision swimming as she grabs her head and groans.

She can practically hear Jeff rolling his eyes.

"You're pathetic, you know that."

If she moves she'll be sick all over him. Probably a good plan, now that she thinks about it, but all she can manage is, "turn the light off".

He does, but not before pulling the covers up to her neck, his hand lingering on her head for just a half-second.

She sleeps, and dreams. The pool again, green and glowing, and the woods surrounding the house. The dead midwinter trees, reaching and hungry, wanting to pull her into the darkest part of the forest, and the bass is so loud from the party, she's already slipping away.

**XVIII.**

The waves of the fever just toss her around, no life raft or hand to hold onto, and spit her onto the shores of a shifting ground she can't get a hold of. Not unlike her marriage did, when it was done with her.

(Pools don't have any waves. They're so calm, and inviting.)

A weird thing about being stuck in some fever underworld where she keeps dreaming about black trees and drowning: she has no idea what's real and what's not. Maybe it's real when the wind rattles her windows or maybe it's real when she wakes up and the room is the muted bluegrey of a fresh hurt or when it's pitch black and she can't tell if she's actually awake or still on the edge of the woods, with the pool water glimmering like a promise in front of her.

Maybe it's still a dream, she doesn't really know, maybe she sees light from the other side of the bedroom door and hears someone on the phone, pacing, heavy footsteps, and hands that are so dry and cool and steady, maybe he puts a hand to her forehead, maybe his fingers brush her skin.

Maybe someone is there and maybe it's just he, imagining things. Which she hates, because if she's learned anything it's that nobody is going to take care of her, she's on her own.

Then she's back in the woods that night, and the trees whispering about her like rumors and the bass thuds and shocks her too-weary body and her head hurts so much her heart hurts so much. The water is still there for her, whenever she closes her eyes, but she still keeps waking up. She keeps waking herself up.

**XIX.**

She wakes up from another pool dream coughing so hard she thinks her skeleton is jolting loose, bones snapping apart like twigs. Her chest is so filled with fluid, maybe she really is drowning.

The bedroom door slams, rattling everything resting on her nightstand, and something reaches through the darkness and yanks her upright.

"Sit."

She'd yell if she could, but she can't do anything except cough, her ribs aching and her throat searing every time.

The hand impatiently drags her to as close to an upright position as she can manage, dangling off the side of the mattress.

"Come on," Jeff says. "Sit up."

He jams a cup of clear, foul liquid into her mouth, and she almost gags, spitting it on the front of her sleep shirt.

"Oh no," he replies, pushing the cup through her cracked lips. "You're taking the whole thing."

He yanks her hair, tilting her head back, and forces her to swallow. "I'm getting some sleep tonight if I have to tape your damn mouth shut."

She chokes and sputters and eventually gets it down, and he rolls his eyes when she gulps water to get rid of the taste.

"Thank me later," he says. "But for now, just shut up. And let me sleep."

He stomps out, leaving her to nurse a grudge and a cough that dies down after ten minutes, and is gone completely in twenty. She lies under the covers and closes her eyes and doesn't dream of the pool for the rest of the night, and when she wakes up the ache in her chest is replaced by something else.

**XX.**

Another and another and another dream of the pool and the water and the falling and the blackness. It's so dark in her room she can't tell if her eyes are open or closed. There's nothing but the sound of her heartbeat under the sheets and her entire body feels like she was hit by a whole garage of trucks. She gets up, feeling like an old lady, creaking as she tests her footing. Unsteady, but she holds onto the wall and pushes for the door.

Jeff is sitting on the couch with his laptop. As always, she's surprised to see him there.

He barely looks at her. "Hey, look who finally decided to join the party."

She stares. It's dark outside her windows but it's been dark so much these days, with the grey skies and the sleet and the ice that's kept them frozen in place.

"How long?" she asks, or tries, because the words fight their way out of her raw throat.

Jeff keeps typing. "Three days. Well –" he peers out the window, "more like three and a half."

"And you've been here?" She stares at him. "The whole time?"

He snorts. "Don't overthink it. You know how pathetic you can look?"

He looks up at her, briefly, and then back down at his computer.

"Besides," he adds. "That fever kept climbing, and it's not like you have people lining up to help the girl who can't open soup."

Maybe she should ask him why he was sleeping by her bed that night at the hospital. Or what he felt when he saw her in the water. Or why he came to her door that day.

But their entire…whatever, it's all beginnings and unanswered questions and things just left hanging in the air, and she decides that she doesn't need everything tied neatly up in a bow to crawl her way back to a career. And if the two of them made it this far on what they've got, they might as well see where it goes.

She grabs the blanket off her bed and sits next to him, and he looks over at her.

"You're not serious."

She blinks. "What?"

He snaps the laptop closed and raises his eyebrows at her.

"You need a couple dozen showers."

She kicks him with the edge of her foot. "Fuuuuuck you."

"I'm just saying," he says. "Use extra soap."

She smacks him with a pillow, and he laughs. She does, too, and it sounds hoarse and hurts her throat but it feels good to do it. It clears her fever-fogged head and now that she thinks about it, her hair and clothes are soaked with sweat and her mouth feels like an animal crawled in there and died. She can smell herself.

She doesn't want to give him the satisfaction, though.

"Hey, Skeletor. I know something that might cheer you up."

He tilts the screen to her. "'Blind' just reached 45,000 downloads."

She can't say anything. Just stares at the number on the screen.

He smirks. "Looks like Bucky and Rayna'll be changing their tunes."

**XXI.**

The scar's still on her hand, from cutting herself on the mirror's edge. It's probably always going to be there now, a white line running down her palm, a new part of her skin.

You can't tell just by looking at her that she tried to die. It used to make her think, go figure. It's not like anyone cared that Will didn't just leave her in the water.

She can see it, though. Sometimes it stares back at her, holding her gaze in steam-fogged bathroom mirrors and storefront reflections, and whenever she tries to remember those last slippery moments before she let herself fall into the freezing, watery glow of the pool that night.

Hands cup her butt as they move to the bed, loud and needy and demanding, a different kind of arguing where they both win and they both lose, falling onto the sheets with teeth and nails that drag her skin with new lines that say something else about her, that mark her in a different way than the cut on her hand or the way the water pulled her in. She wraps her legs around his waist and lifts her hips and they don't need to touch or kiss or speak, just claw, take, fight, cry, need, and they're not in this to fall in love. There isn't any falling here.

**XXII.**

The sky isn't hospital-grey anymore, so the ice is starting to melt and the magnolia tree is still black and bare. But there's springtime under the snow, so it will be back.


End file.
